Anxiety Blows
Anxiety is like navigating a wave in the ocean without a boogie board. Sometimes I float and I’m fine and then the next moment a giant wave comes crashing down on my head and I get sucked underwater and I can’t breathe. Sometimes I can even make it past the breakers and float on my back — not concerned enough to look at what is coming because I feel confident that I’ll keep floating even if I capsize.
I was recently talking to a neighbor about her anxiety and hers began out of nowhere in the past few months and it started with her stopping smoking cigarettes. She teared up just trying to explain what it felt like. I jumped in and used my experiences with anxiety to help her explain hers and she just nodded along as I rambled. In my rambling I found a pretty good analogy that I want to share. When anxiety starts manifesting as a severe disorder (or even just a constant worry if you don’t have an official diagnosis) it’s like a newborn and you are a first time parent. It cries and you don’t know why. It screams and you want to hide from it. Sometimes you feel as hopeless as if you had post-partum depression. As you learn how to cope and understand the cries of your baby, you can regain your sanity. Sometimes your baby will just cry day and night and you can’t figure out why at all and you have to just wait out the storm.
With anxiety it can hit out of nowhere. Maybe you over-ate and the last time you over-ate you had some anxiety over something unrelated but it was so bad that your stomach now associates a full belly with anxiety. If you don’t know this yet then you fear that anything can start a panic attack but not knowing the trigger is terrifying and you start to fear that everything will set you off. It’s hard to go out in public when your baby might start screaming at any minute. The analogy is that your panic attack might turn a social event into a living nightmare if your anxiety kicks in.
Any trauma can start anxiety and/or PTSD. Trauma can be growing up with hostile parents, even if it’s directed at someone else. It can be a car accident, going to war, having cancer, or having a mental illness underneath the traumatic event. I personally think that most of the population in the United States has been traumatized by something. I don’t mean the hyperbolized meaning of traumatized but I mean what can happen with politics when actual rights get taken away by an oligarchy ruling class in government…
Some level of stress is healthy for you. It can motivate you to pull an all-nighter in college when a paper is due. It can make you focus and get through the work day. When the stress starts triggering a fight, flight, or freeze reaction though your body starts releasing cortisone (a stress hormone) and your body starts coping with the potential threat phsyically. Sweaty palm, nausea, tunnel vision, dry throat, dizziness, ringing in the ears, among others. It can be immobilizing.
Imagine walking down the street and a loud noise starts your heart racing like a gun starts a drag race. If you can’t calm yourself down the symptoms escalate. Your heart might start hurting so much that you think you are having a heart attack. That thought makes you even more reactive. It’s a cycle. A viscious viscious cycle.
The good news is that as your anxiety grows older/the start of the first sign of anxiety, you learn what to do to take care of it. Sometimes medicine can halt the psychological symptoms enough that you can learn to cope and put tools in your toolkit to help deal with it. Just as you’d give medicine to a sick baby, you can give medicine to address mental illness. Sometimes if you catch the panic in the early stages you can learn how to intervene and stop it in its tracks. Anxiety kits can distract the senses enough to process the perceived threat. Sometimes you learn to just let it play out and then rest after the draining attack. If you can learn to care for it, it will mature into something that is only an occasional pain in the ass, like most children. Watch out for the regression in the form of puberty. It’s a doozy.
